Kyle Bruckmann always felt he had a choice to make, and when he enrolled in the graduate music program at the University of Michigan in 1994 as a classical oboist he thought he was making it. “I actually thought I was going to grad school to finally settle down and behave myself,” he says. “I was going to get all the rock and illegitimate stuff out of my system, and then I was going to buckle down and get an orchestra job.”
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He stuck with it, but by the time he was in high school he’d also discovered punk rock via the local college radio station and began playing synthesizer in industrial-punk bands. “It never occurred to me that those two worlds had any possibility of, much less business, interpenetrating,” he says. “Even through college I carefully maintained my distance between the college-radio me and the me that was practicing Mozart concertos.” Bruckmann studied music at Rice University in Houston, a school with a reputation for producing topflight symphony musicians and opera singers. There he met bassist Kurt Johnson–a music grad student–as well as percussionists Philip Montoro and Mark Stevens, who shared his love of punk rock and noise. Together they formed the aggressive punk-prog band Lozenge in 1992, with Bruckmann playing accordion. Before dispersing in 1994 they went on a two-week tour to New York and back, and the next year they released what they thought would be their first and last CD, Plenum. Bruckmann meanwhile headed to grad school at Michigan, where his interest in jazz and improv blossomed; by the time he was finishing up, he and the other former members of Lozenge had decided to reconvene in Chicago. The band practiced relentlessly and began playing locally; they’ve since released two more albums and toured several more times.
Shortly after Bruckmann’s arrival here, cellist Bob Marsh introduced him to the local free-improv scene, and he soon became a fixture on it. One of the first improv gigs he saw featured another oboist, Robbie Hunsinger. He approached her afterward; within a few months they’d found a third double reedist, bassoonist Tim McLoraine, and formed the trio Corvus. In addition to oboe Bruckmann had begun playing other double-reed instruments like English horn, raita, and suona.
Wrack plays the Bottle on Wednesday, October 15, and the Hungry Brain’s Phrenology Festival on Monday, October 27. Lozenge plays the Fireside on Saturday, October 25.
